I don't post often, but all the information I receive when I post is appreciated and very helpful.
I thank the community.
Here's the question. What is expected of a technician during a day, week or month of work.
My company judges our performance by the the amount we bill, that's right. A figure of 3. 2 times our hourly wage is what is expected. So at $20/hr we should bill $512 a day.
I have never heard of such a practice before but this is the first calibration company I've worked for after a 13 year absence from the field.
I also heard 17025 state something about not placing financial pressure on technicians.
I'm interested in all replies, from the technician's and manager's perspective.
Thanks to all.
Actually most companies want us to bill $1000 a day.
I will reply from a manager's perspective though I'm not a cal lab manager per se. Assuming you are working for a company that bills calibrations by the hour, they will have to quantify your performance somehow. There should be a quality aspect to how they quantify your work. That would probably be measured by your track record with quality assurance. There should also be some metric for how hard and fast you work. For instance if one technician cal's a scope in an hour and another takes two hours for the same quality cal, the tech who does the cal in one hour should earn a higher salary. That only makes sense if you are the guy who works harder, smarter and faster.
If the above scope bills out to the customer for a $100 cal, by your formula the faster tech should make $31. 25 / hour and the slower tech should make half that pay. If you are making $30 per hour and taking two hours to cal that scope, your employer is barely covering his expenses. Just as you have a right to earn a fair living, your employer has a right to make a fair profit. As an employer if someone in my company is not earning profit for the company (directly or indirectly), I need to look at lowering their pay or replacing them with someone who can pull their share of the load.
So while 17025 may state that financial pressure cannot be put on technicians, a business has to make profit or it will cease to exist, and in a third party calibration business, each technician is his own profit center which creates measurable results. I suspect that after a 13 year layoff you are not working as efficiently as someone who has been working in the field for all that time. Hang in there for a bit. It will come back to you. In the mean time you should try to impress your boss with how hard you work and how easy you are to get along with because they may have to make some investment in you until you become a more profitable employee. Until then, the best advice I can give is don't make waves.
Hello I worked at a company 8 years ago and at that time. I was expected to earn $1500 per day at onsite. I billed an average of 30k per month. Of course I suppose I should also add that I was working about 50 hours per week.
Keep up the good work guys! You make my job of justifying equipment and personnel that much easier.
And how is it that we are helping?
Absolutely Not,
As a current Manager of a Lab I will never base my employees pay based on "Work" billed and here are my reasons why.
-First and foremost my employees are a "team". We sink or swim together. Does this mean I wont fire someone for slacking on purpose no.
-Second, a pay based structure on the amount of work "billed" could lead to crappy work. I want customers happy. Its alot harder to find new customers then retaining my current customers.
-Third, most of what my employees bill is based on the work I give them not the work they choose. I have employees that can calibrate great quantities of equipment at a time with great skill but cant troubleshoot anything. Vise-Versa I have great troubleshooters but they arent great calibrators. Is one more important than the other...NO. The calibration Tech will always bill more than my repair tech but if I cant repair my customers equipment in a timely manner will I have the contract from my customer to calibrate? We all lose.
-Finally not all equipment is equal. An RF Tech will always make more money than a DC Low Freq Tech. I cant ask my customer just to send me equipment that makes me the most money. A contract comes with all types of equipment. Like before if we didnt cal it all we wouldnt have the contract.
My pay raise structure is based on work performance not work billed. I want people who are ontime, continually make my customers happy, which is usually through quality work and who continually strive to look for ways to improve our processes and themselves. With this type of structure I am proud to say I have minimal turnaround, about a tech every 7 years, and the group of people I work with are great. We have always exceeded are yearly profit expectations.
QuoteAnd how is it that we are helping?
The higher the cost of out sourcing means I can spend more money for both equipment and people and still come in cheaper. It allows me to expand the capabilities of our own metrology department and still show cost savings over what I would pay to have you guys come in and do the work.
ck454ss - How do you quantify the amount of work performed if you don't look at the hours billed? And shouldn't the RF tech earn more than the DC LF tech? He probably has a higher skill level than the DC guy.
I hope this answers your question. I do not base "Pay" performance on individual billing. I base my cost on yearly billing. I do use hours worked to average what my hourly billing is. If my lab made 1 Million last year with 10 Tech lets say. After Tax Profit was 250k. I will take 200K of that and reinvest in the lab for new equipment, nehicles etc. That would leave me 50K for payraises. From that ALL employees will get a minimum payraise. Some maybe a little more based on performance aspects such as customer satisfaction/Quality of work..etc. Never because they "billed" more. There are so many aspects to why someone "billed" more. The concept I stress to my techs is we are a TEAM. We all benefit from each others performance. No one person is more important than another. And no my RF Tech doesnt make more than my DC guy. In actuality all my techs can perform each others jobs through cross training. Some techs are stronger in some areas than others. I dont think Im explaining myself correctly. Hope this helps.
I don't disagree with your method ck. Different companies have different philosophies and yours sounds pretty friendly to the employee. I also can't fault the lab that takes a different approach to quantify the value of each employee and reward those that are making more money for the company.
I find it a little surprising that your RF guys aren't stronger techs than the guy calibrating handheld DMM's though. Cross training is great, but the guy who can cal a spec-an is being wasted working on DMM's & is probably being paid too much to make money on them. Conversely if your top dog RF guy isn't getting paid extra for his skills, he is probably quite underpaid.
Quote from: RichieRich on 01-07-2008 -- 14:33:56
ck454ss - How do you quantify the amount of work performed if you don't look at the hours billed? And shouldn't the RF tech earn more than the DC LF tech? He probably has a higher skill level than the DC guy.
not really. Most RF guys DONT go onsite (which is the wave of the future) a lot of companies want their equipment done onsite in a week instead of sending it in over the year
Quote from: OlDave on 01-07-2008 -- 12:02:27
QuoteAnd how is it that we are helping?
The higher the cost of out sourcing means I can spend more money for both equipment and people and still come in cheaper. It allows me to expand the capabilities of our own metrology department and still show cost savings over what I would pay to have you guys come in and do the work.
Yes that makes sense. However from my observations it has always seemed that the companies would still save a good bit of money by hiring a company to do a permanent onsite at your location. It basically depends on what your company is calibrating. If it is mostly DMM's and some mechanical stuff then it might be cheaper to do it in house. However if it is higher end stuff like a few spec ans and high end DMM's then sometimes the cost of the equipment is prohibative. Just my 2 cents.
We use a metrics based system measuring several different goals such as Units/hr, Error Rate, Contract Reviews, etc. but performance does not end there we also use core competencies and specific values. This is Performance Management which also looks at developmental oportunities.
You are correct when you state that techs are shielded from outside pressures. $$ being only one of them, so performance can be measured against a weighted performance scale but ISO 17025 requires internal and in process audits to assess the quality of the lab and or associate. The problem I see with most labs is that they (management) only looks at the bottom line instead of how can the bottom line be improved with good people, standards, processes, performance management, etc.
Quote from: OlDave on 01-07-2008 -- 12:02:27
QuoteAnd how is it that we are helping?
The higher the cost of out sourcing means I can spend more money for both equipment and people and still come in cheaper. It allows me to expand the capabilities of our own metrology department and still show cost savings over what I would pay to have you guys come in and do the work.
Hello all the companies I have looked at in your situation save money by outsourcing. I might have billed $1500 for one day but I also was calibrating like 70-80 micrometers in that day (12 hour day) or as many as 45 fluke 87 77 or that type of meter.
Quote from: skolito on 01-08-2008 -- 07:04:36
Quote from: RichieRich on 01-07-2008 -- 14:33:56
ck454ss - How do you quantify the amount of work performed if you don't look at the hours billed? And shouldn't the RF tech earn more than the DC LF tech? He probably has a higher skill level than the DC guy.
not really. Most RF guys DONT go onsite (which is the wave of the future) a lot of companies want their equipment done onsite in a week instead of sending it in over the year
I go onsite all the time. It is cheaper for a large company with a lot of RF equipment to have it done onsite rather than shipping it or having lon down times with the equipment.